Juno News - Carney is accused of misleading Canadians about the country’s finances

00:00:00.000 Okay, let's switch over then and start talking about Mark Carney's budget, because one of the

00:00:04.240 things that you just mentioned is this kind of sleight of hand that seems to be taking place

00:00:08.860 with the difference between a capital deficit or a capital budget and operational budget.

00:00:15.220 And so, you know, typically you would assume that, you know, operations is the day-to-day

00:00:19.620 spending of the government, and then the capital spending is investments in the future. And somehow

00:00:24.460 in mark carney's costed platform uh budget he sort of increased the number of things that you could

00:00:31.420 typically uh discuss uh describe as being investments in the country and so that that

00:00:36.700 was sort of a way that he could say that he you know he's not racking up as much deficit as

00:00:42.380 possible could you help us understand like what what he did and why is that allowed like how is

00:00:47.980 it that a prime minister could just like change the way that we account of our federal spending

00:00:53.260 Well, first of all, the federal government and all the provinces have adopted capital

00:00:57.660 budgeting for a long time now. And in fact, you calculate an operating budget where you subtract

00:01:03.820 off from the revenues received and all the costs of running the government, including depreciation

00:01:10.780 costs on capital. And then you might have a capital budget that you report the capital,

00:01:18.540 and then as it depreciates you you know provide a stock but uh that's been done you know by the

00:01:25.100 provinces and and the federal government for for some time but there's always this issue about what

00:01:29.820 you call capital and if you put money into a bunch of funds uh that uh may not be spent until later

00:01:37.100 time you're not necessarily creating capital uh or at least not much capital and and so it's very

00:01:41.980 confusing actually uh in terms of what is being called capital uh in without further explanation

00:01:48.060 coming from the liberal party and so when i look at all this so-called capital expenditure it looks

00:01:54.060 like to me it's just a bunch of money to be put aside to be spent in the future in fact they talk

00:02:01.180 about you know cash costs versus accrual accounting and it does sound like they're

00:02:05.900 they're naming a lot of things as capital but it's not clear it really is capital

Juno News - April 24, 2025